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Another global warming scare story bites the dust: fragile islands and atolls in the Pacific are not sinking beneath the waves because of global warming. In fact, they are doing just fine.

The bad news (only bad for alarmists, of course) comes in a study by Virginie Duvat of the University of La Rochelle-CNRS, France, titled ‘A global assessment of atoll island planform changes over the past decades’.

It surveyed 30 Pacific and Indian Ocean atolls, including 709 islands, and found that 90 per cent have either remained stable or have grown in the last few decades.

Governments will need to take account of the information and its accelerating trend as they plan future defences to protect low-lying coastal communities.

The researchers say the losses are occurring predominantly in the West of the continent, where warm waters are getting under and melting the fronts of glaciers that terminate in the ocean.

“We can’t say when it started – we didn’t collect measurements in the sea back then,” explained Prof Andrew Shepherd, who leads the Ice sheet Mass Balance Inter-comparison Exercise (Imbie).

“But what we can say is that it’s too warm for Antarctica today. It’s about half a degree Celsius warmer than the continent can withstand and it’s melting about five metres of ice from its base each year, and that’s what’s triggering the sea-level contribution that we’re seeing,” he told BBC News.

So it’s over, right? The Warmunists were right, the deniers were wrong and global warming is a super serial crisis we need to deal with NOW not the day after tomorrow…

Beneath the warm cuddly exterior of the bunny-hugging greenie beats the heart of a fascist. If you ever doubted it, check out this Voxinterview with William T Vollmann.

Vollmann is an award-winning author and war correspondent once described as the most “ambitious, audacious writer working in America today” and tipped as a plausible Nobel Prize for Literature candidate. He claims once to have been a climate change ‘denier’ but not any more.

The climate change threat is so dire, he believes, that only the most drastic solutions will do:

It’s not just what some consumer does at home. It’s niggling little issues that add up. In Japan, roughly 50 percent or so of all the methane emissions — and that’s one of the three most dangerous greenhouse gases — are caused by rice growing. All this stuff that seems so innocuous. It seems to me that you have to drag people into some kind of regulatory hell, unfortunately. Maybe there’s a better way to do it, but I don’t see one.

Stopping the Japanese eating rice because muh climate change? Now that is extreme. But then, Vollmann is an extreme person: his ascetic, Luddite lifestyle – he doesn’t have a cellphone or use email – at one point led police to suspect that he might be the Unabomber.

The climate loons – and their amen corner in the liberal MSM – want you to panic about a new study claiming that sea level rise is accelerating.
‘Miami could be underwater in your kid’s lifetime,’ says USA Today.

At the current rate, the world’s oceans will be on average at least 60cm (2ft) higher by the end of the century, according to research published in Monday’s Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences.

Based on 25 years of satellite data, however, the research shows that the pace has quickened. It confirms scientists’ computer simulations and is in line with predictions from the UN, which releases regular climate change reports.

“It’s a big deal” because the projected sea level rise is a conservative estimate and it is likely to be higher, said the lead author, Steve Nerem of the University of Colorado.

A University of Auckland study examined changes in the geography of Tuvalu’s nine atolls and 101 reef islands between 1971 and 2014, using aerial photographs and satellite imagery.

It found eight of the atolls and almost three-quarters of the islands grew during the study period, lifting Tuvalu’s total land area by 2.9 percent, even though sea levels in the country rose at twice the global average.

Co-author Paul Kench said the research, published Friday in the journal Nature Communications, challenged the assumption that low-lying island nations would be swamped as the sea rose.

“We tend to think of Pacific atolls as static landforms that will simply be inundated as sea levels rise, but there is growing evidence these islands are geologically dynamic and are constantly changing,” he said.

“The study findings may seem counter-intuitive, given that (the) sea level has been rising in the region over the past half century, but the dominant mode of change over that time on Tuvalu has been expansion, not erosion.”

If only they’d done their study a bit earlier they could have saved a lot of alarmists a lot of worry.

Tangier Island in the middle of Chesapeake Bay, about an hour’s boat ride from the Virginia mainland, rises only a few feet above the waterline and has been slowly eroded by the sea since it was first colonized in the 1600s. Now its 500 remaining residents are desperate for federal support because it is on the verge of disappearing.

But when they asked for support from Donald Trump to help them build a wall – a sea wall, this time, to hold back the eroding waves – it prompted a barrage of hate from outsiders. Their crime, apparently, was to blame the island’s plight on natural erosion and not rising sea levels caused by man-made climate change.

The president’s call triggered other calls to the island – but these were different. Some condemned the people here for seemingly agreeing with the president’s controversial view of climate change. He has called it a hoax.

One business received a message that said, “You voted for Donald f***** Trump haha oh god I hope your whole f***** island sinks.”

“It was disheartening and it was upsetting,” said Laurie Thomas. She works for the town and said one man called to say that she and the people on the island deserved to die.

Their other crime was to be the kind of independent, hard-working, honest, all-American types – Tangier Island harvests more of the bay’s prized blue crabs, 13 percent, than any other town in Virginia – who inevitably voted for Donald Trump.

Eighty-seven percent of Tangier Island’s residents voted for the Donald. He noticed and in June spoke to the mayor James “Ooker” Eskridge who drew the president’s attention to the island’s plight.

“We need help from the erosion. If it was just sea level rise that we were worried about, we would be in good shape,” Eskridge said.

Help looks like a rock wall. One was built on the island’s western side in the 1980s and the erosion there stopped. Now, they say their only hope is a wall around the entire island—costing an estimated $20 to $30 million, which they don’t have.

They’d like Congress to approve the money and Mayor Eskridge thinks President Trump could help cut through all the red tape.

“He’s gonna cut back on the time it takes to do studies for these projects — we don’t have that time to play with,” Eskridge said.

He thinks if Mr. Trump told Congress he wanted to save the island, it would be saved.

Oh – and the islanders are, of course, right to blame erosion and not “climate change” for their island’s plight.

This week’s Spectator cover star Nils-Axel Mörner . . .

. . . brings some good news to a world otherwise mired in misery: sea levels are not rising dangerously – and haven’t been for at least 300 years. To many readers this may come as a surprise. After all, are not rising sea levels – caused, we are given to understand, by melting glaciers and shrinking polar ice – one of the main planks of the IPCC’s argument that we need to act now to ‘combat climate change’?

Between 8000 and 7000 years ago, sea levels rose 11.5 metres (1150 cm), or 1.15 cm/year, without killing life on earth. The current rate of rise is 0.2 to 0.4 cm/year, depending on which measurements you use. Sea levels were 120 metres lower some 18,000 years ago, at the height of the last ice age. 450 million years ago, sea levels were 400 metres higher than today. That’s natural variability for you. Those who try to artificially keep nature in status quo don’t understand that it doesn’t exist. Change is the basis for everything. There is no balance of nature, and no natural stability other than negative feedback from cloud cover which cancels out CO2. The ecofascists have no baseline marker to call “natural” because the world is ever changing.

Who are “those”? No-one with half a brain would ever think that nature would remain static. All the more reason to rely on proper research, not loonies like Morner who believes in dowsing (and looked a proper berk when challenged to prove it), and that he has discovered “the Hong Kong of the Greeks” in Sweden.

Michael Mann’s hockey stick curve was faked to show constant temperature until CO2 began rising. IPCC/NASA gurus on the Horizon BBC2 “Science under Attack” propaganda film claimed that humanity emits 7 times more CO2 than nature, when in fact natural sources of CO2 emit 30 times more (even the IPCC 4th assessment report lists in its un-hyped small print that humanity’s emission is 29 Gt of CO2 from all fossil fuels etc, compared to 771 Gt from all natural land and ocean emissions). It’s well within the natural climate fluctuations of CO2, and the scare-propaganda relies entirely on censoring out the evidence of natural variability by tricks like switching temperature proxies at 1960 and 1980 so as to try to produce a hockey stick curve.

Before 1960 they use tree rings as the major proxy, which is false because tree growth is sensitive to cloud cover and rainfall, not particularly CO2 levels. From 1960-80 they used temperature station records near expanding “heat islands” like industrial factories and cities. After 1980 they used satellites which can’t tell the temperature under the cloud cover where all negative-feedback from cloud cover actually occurs. No prizes for guessing that the satellite “temperature data” didn’t properly include negative feedback from the extra cloud cover resulting from the extra evaporation of water due to rising CO2. They’re complete fanatics, who don’t donate a single brain cell to objectivity, let alone half a brain!

Gordonrear says:9th December 2011 at 6:56 amNige, did you copy and paste every debunked and/or scientific conspiracy argument found on the internet into your reply?

Anonymous says:9th December 2011 at 7:39 amWe dont have to invent stories about conspiracies – they’re all in Climategate, in plain view. Only an idiot or a fanatic can fail to see how damning the evidence against the climate community is.

Take this gem for example – the WWF brokering a deal between Climategate Scientists and the Australian CSIRO on how much they should lie about the risk of extreme weather.

I’m sure you will get some comments direct from Mike Rae in WWF Australia, but I wanted to pass on the gist of what they’ve said to me so far.

They are worried that this may present a slightly more conservative
approach to the risks than they are hearing from CSIRO. In particular, they would like to see the section on variability and extreme events beefed up if possible.

All of cheats, liars and charlatans ALWAYS start talking about intelligent design or religion to avoid the science using ad hominem attacks, and when you point out that this led to the holocaust, they ALWAYS then claim they are not attacking people’s beliefs, they are just conflating one thing with another in an ad hominem smear campaign of racial hatred disguised as objectivity:

“Ad hominem attacks on people’s religious views are not science. Eugenicists like Medical Nobel Laureate Alexis Carrel (the first to propose gas chambers for “ethnic cleansing” in his 1935 bestseller, “Man the Unknown”) dismissed critics for being Jews. Making ad hominem attacks doesn’t count, I’m very sorry to tell you dear.”

These ad hominem attackers know nothing of science, but dominate the media and politics scene.

We need to censor out those who avoid the science and try to reject criticisms on the basis of conflating “science credentials” with personal preferences concerning irrelevant issues like religion or the best filling in a doughnut.

Nigel Cook says:9th December 2011 at 8:46 amAGW is debunked by Dr Roy Spencer: negative feedback from H2O and how it is being censored out by circular arguments, you guys will be as popular as eugenicists, so watch out. If you warm the ocean surface a bit (which covers 71% of the globe, unlike a greenhouse) the evaporated water forms extra clouds which cool the altitudes below the clouds and due to convective rising of warm air there is no mechanism for vertical mixing so the surface stays cool. In a “greenhouse” this can’t happen due to a glass ceiling, which all IPCC models implicitly assume. You eugenicists just want to profit from the green carbon credits, admit it! Actually the climate is always varying so there is 50% chance of rising temperatures, 50% of falling temperatures. This reduces the statistical value of correlations of CO2 and temperature when you take account of the fact that there is a 50% chance of an apparent “correlation”. It’s complete bullshit, and always has been:

Brian Rose says:9th December 2011 at 12:06 pmOh dear. That would be the same Roy Spencer who is an advisor to the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation and a signatory to “An Evangelical Declaration on Global Warming”, which tells us

“We believe Earth and its ecosystems — created by God’s intelligent design and infinite power and sustained by His faithful providence — are robust, resilient, self-regulating, and self-correcting, admirably suited for human flourishing, and displaying His glory. Earth’s climate system is no exception.”

Incidentally the junk science that is Intelligent Design has been criticised by, among others, Ian Plimer, who needs no introduction here I am sure.

Even accepting that the AGW supporters like Mann or Jones are charlatans does not redeem equal (or rather greater) charlatans like Morner; surely Nige you don’t believe in dowsing? Or intelligent design? Of course they might simply be right about AGW and wrong about dowsing etc (indeed, I would maintain Plimer was right about intelligent design, but rather shoddy when it comes to AGW – deliberately reversing findings of papers, relying on discredited sources etc – again this is not fatal to the anti-AGW thesis but nor does it help it) but it’s not much of an advertisement for Morner’s scientific credentials, is it?

Nigel Cook says:9th December 2011 at 12:40 pmAd hominem attacks on people’s religious views are not science. Eugenicists like Medical Nobel Laureate Alexis Carrel (the first to propose gas chambers for “ethnic cleansing” in his 1935 bestseller, “Man the Unknown”) dismissed critics for being Jews. Making ad hominem attacks doesn’t count, I’m very sorry to tell you dear.

Brian Rose says:9th December 2011 at 12:58 pmYour Alexis Carrel reference should win a prize for the most irrelevant comment in any comment thread anywhere in the history of the internet. I have no problem with anyone’s religious views. I do have a problem when they try and pass them off as science, such as intelligent design, which has as much scientific basis as the flying spaghetti monster, or “intelligent falling” (the deliberate parody of ID). The fact that Spencer advances such nonsense does not speak well of his credentials as a scientist, any more than Morner’s belief in Dowsing advances his.

I can just imagine what you would say about a pro-AGW “scientist” who supported ID or dowsing – why the double standard for the sceptics?

Nigel Cook says:9th December 2011 at 1:06 pm“Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity.” – George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty Four, Chancellor Press, London, 1984, p. 225.